• Project Prometheus: Playing with Fire

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you browse the various forums of the OS/400 community when you are bored, like I know many of you do, you might have recently run across something called “Project Prometheus.” There has been a lot of speculation about what this super-secret project might be, ranging from a revamped marketing campaign to a new line of System i servers. I have done some digging, and I can tell you a little about it. The one thing I am not going to tell you is exactly who is behind Project Prometheus. Prometheus was a Greek Titans who stole fire from the

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• IBM Offers Contingency Planning Assessment Service for Pandemics

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Trying to prove yet again that IBM is more than an IT provider and that it has some expertise in dealing with disasters, Big Blue last week announced a new consulting and technology service to help companies deal with a potential flu pandemic. A cynic might say that there is no disaster that a clever company like IBM cannot and will not exploit for profit. But, to be fair, while the immediate potential of a flu pandemic is somewhat remote, the amount of disruption that such a pandemic might cause to business and our personal lives is no doubt potentially

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• MKS Says Business Is Booming Enough to Give Dividends

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Canadian software change management vendor MKS reported its financial results for its fourth quarter and year end for fiscal 2006 last week, and business is so good that the company has instituted the practice of giving investors dividends. MKS had sales of $12.6 million (U.S. dollars, not Canadian) in its fourth fiscal quarter ended April 30, which was up only a smidgen from the same quarter last year, and its application lifecycle management (ALM) software sales declined by 2 percent to $10 million. The company brought a mind-bogglingly large $6 million to the bottom line, an increase of over 256

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• Sales Up 8 Percent in the Third Quarter for SSA Global

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Conglomerate ERP software supplier SSA Global, soon to be a part of the larger Infor ERP conglomerate if its acquisition is not blocked by a lawsuit that was launched two weeks ago, has announced its financial results for its fiscal third quarter ended April 30. In the quarter, SSA reported licenses revenues of $62.3 million, up 19 percent from last year and increasing to 32 percent of total sales for the company, compared to 29 percent in the year ago quarter. Total sales increased by 8 percent to $194.6 million, but net income fell by exactly half to $4.6

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• IDC Projects Disk Array Capacity to Keep Exploding Through 2010

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While the server market is showing some signs, once again, of slowing down, the disk storage market doesn’t seem to be showing any breathlessness. According to the projections cooked up by the analysts at IDC, we can expect the appetite for disk storage to continue unabated through 2010. According to those projections, the amount of terabytes shipped each year between 2005 and 2010 will grow, on average, 50 percent a year, which is just a staggering amount of capacity. This is more or less the rate that disk capacity shipments have been growing for as long as anyone can

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• Pirates Steal $34 Billion in PC Software in 2005

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  “Grrrr. Aaargh! Tie that scurvy dog to the yardarm!” With so many open source operating systems and office automation programs in the world these days, you might be thinking that software piracy would be a thing of the past. But not so, according to the Business Software Alliance, which estimates that some $34 billion in PC software was pirated from software makers in 2005. This was an increase of 5 percent compared to the amount of PC software pirated in 2004. Ironically, the rate of piracy was steady, but the amount of PC software sold increased at 5 percent,

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• Executives Complain That IT Is Broken and Can’t Keep Up

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Business Performance Management Forum, a three-year-old organization dedicated to the elusive task of measuring the performance of businesses and helping them to improve themselves, and webMethods, a provider of business integration software, last week released a study that basically said that the IT organizations of the world are broken and they can’t keep up with the changes that modern businesses require to chase new opportunities. To many ears in the IT organizations of the world, which have been under pressure to do more with less for five relentless years, this may sound like an awful lot of

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• As I See It: Taking Care

  June 12, 2006 Victor Rozek

  It took my mother a long time to die. It wasn’t quick and tidy like Bing Crosby collapsing on the golf course while playing the game he loved. Her decline was lengthy, and difficult, and sometimes unpleasant. And, as the only child, the responsibility for her care fell to me. There were days when her problems were so consuming and overwhelming that I thought there was not enough time or money in the whole world to solve them. Of course, the biggest problem wasn’t solvable at all–she was dying–and no amount of visits, or medications, or trips to the doctor,

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• Gartner Report Espouses the Virtues of i5/OS

  June 12, 2006 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While all of us live each week in the OS/400 community in one capacity or another, many of the business managers that you work with do not know what the AS/400, iSeries, or System i5 are, nor do they have any idea what the OS/400 or i5/OS operating system are or why they should care. If this is true of the people at your company, imagine how little the people at companies who have never installed an IBM midrange box know about the System i5 and i5/OS. But, the two names they most certainly do know are IBM and Gartner

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• The Dollars and Sense of Training Newbie RPG Programmers

  June 12, 2006 Mary Lou Roberts

  Look around at your fellow workers in IT. If you’re in a typical AS/400 shop (yes, I said “AS/400” on purpose), you might notice one thing about your cohorts that constitutes a significant difference from those whippersnapper Windows folks. No, I don’t mean that you’re working on a stable, reliable platform and they aren’t; I’m hinting at the fact that you probably have more gray hair then they do–and perhaps a little more paunch as well. You also are more likely to spend weekends with the kids (or grandkids?), to remember the days when no one had personal computers, to

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